I am a Swede. Historically, my country has been best known for cheap flat-pack furniture from IKEA, the occasional tennis player and, of course, ABBA. Today, our most famous export is Greta Thunberg, teenage climate activist turned 22-year-old anti-Israel activist.

This week, Thunberg was deported from Israel alongside about 170 other pro-Palestinian activists after—for the second time—boarding a flotilla headed toward Gaza. She was explicitly intending to violate the naval blockade on Gaza, one that Israel imposed in 2009 to prevent Hamas from smuggling weapons into the region. As with everything Thunberg does, her journey to Gaza was broadcast across the world, as she hurtled toward the inevitable and obviously desired clash with the Israeli military.

But as most of us know, she didn’t begin as an anti-Israel activist. Thunberg first became a household name in 2018 at the age of 15, when she began a “school strike for climate.” For three weeks leading up to the Swedish elections, she sat outside the parliament building in Stockholm, protesting for “urgent action on the climate crisis.” Her movement went viral, inspiring similar actions around the world, and in 2019, she was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. A somewhat awkward young girl, Thunberg was accepted by many as some sort of world conscience—a young girl speaking truth to power. She rose to global fame by telling her adoring followers the many ways in which they had failed her.

Thunberg is a phenomenon. But more importantly, she is a case study of what has gone wrong in Sweden and the rest of Europe over the past several decades. She is a lost child on a lost continent, both desperately seeking purpose.

Eighty years ago, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, much of Europe lay physically devastated. As the rebuilding efforts began, alongside them came an ideological and philosophical reckoning. As a continent, Europe asked itself how evil had taken hold, and how to ensure that it would never happen again.

As with any autopsy, the hunt was on for a definitive cause of death, a clear and concrete villain to blame for the atrocities of World War II. To accept that seemingly normal people under extraordinary circumstances can do terrible things is fundamentally unsatisfying. It means accepting that there is good and evil in this world, and in us all.

Which is why Europe decided that the villain was ideology itself. Ideology, built on religious belief and defined identity, led to the formation of nation states, borders, and divisions between places, people, and beliefs. This, the postwar idea went, was what caused conflict. Thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault described nationalism and the nation-state as moral and political dangers, advocating for global humanism while questioning the very idea of basing a shared identity on religious belief and nationalist sentiment.

Political leaders of the time followed suit: German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, European Parliament member Altiero Spinelli, and French politicians Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet championed the idea of replacing nationalism with a pan-European identity, alongside a common economic and cultural ethos. And so a war-damaged continent, having just come out of a global conflict over borders and identity, decided to do away with borders and identity altogether, assuming this would be the road to lasting peace.

The first step was in 1951, when the Treaty of Paris created the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) to integrate the continent’s coal and steel industries into one market, governed by European bodies composed of representatives from member states. This lay the foundation for the eventual 1993 establishment of the European Union, officially replacing individual nations with one common identity, the European.

The intervening years saw the rise of the social-democratic welfare state throughout Western Europe, with a strong philosophical undercurrent emphasizing collective responsibility, solidarity, and social justice. In the late 1960s, student revolts spread across Europe, merging postcolonial anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, feminism, and humanism.

Gradually, the younger generations replaced the identity-based religions of the old with the universalist ethos of the new. And the continent then began to see itself as a model for the rest of the world: a borderless Europe, with nothing more to fight over.

On paper, it was the perfect plan.

But then something happened: It met with reality. As part of its rejection of ideology, Europe rejected God. Separation of church and state became the norm; laws rooted in religious morality were liberalized; religious attendance and education collapsed; and public life was secularized. As religion was leached from our lives, humanism and universalism were offered as a trade, creating a vacuum of faith and meaning—and vacuums, as we know, long to be filled.

The country of my birth refuses to stand for anything, and therefore falls for everything, time and time again.

This happened all over Europe, but perhaps nowhere more starkly than in my native country. According to the 2023–24 European Social Survey, less than 5 percent of Swedes attend religious services at least once a week, among the lowest rates in the world. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of Swedes said that “religion should be kept separate from government policies,” and only 22 percent said that religion plays a somewhat or very important role in their life, compared with 70 percent in the U.S. After decades of ideological and spiritual erosion, Sweden is now a country without a God, a national ethos, or a sense of identity.

The country of my birth refuses to stand for anything, and therefore falls for everything, time and time again. Look at the migrant crisis. In 2015, Sweden—a country of about 10 million—allowed about 163,000 asylum seekers over its borders, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Over the next 10 years, many of these immigrants failed to assimilate, causing continued social and economic upheaval. Much of that is because Sweden had no national identity to instill. You cannot teach what you do not know—this is true for raising a child and true when steering a nation.

Faith, shared purpose, and identity are the walls that build the house that makes a nation. At this point, Sweden is little but an open tent. Thunberg is a product of this nation. For young Europeans like her, it is not about the issues themselves; it is about being part of something. It is not about doing good, but rather looking good. Where there once was faith and purpose, there is now only posturing and projection.

Greta Thunberg speaks as at Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport in Athens, Greece, on October 6, 2025. (Milos Bicanski via Getty Images)

This gives context to Thunberg’s ideological shift, in October 2023, from climate activism to anti-Israel activism—a shift joined by thousands of others across the continent. Israel represents the very opposite of the vacuum that Europe has built. It is a proud nation-state with borders, faith, ideology, and explicit purpose and ideals. Its people, while constantly disagreeing, are united by an identity much larger than the issues of the day. Israel is everything that Europe once rejected. Its success would be proof that the European postwar shift was a failure, and still is.

But Thunberg isn’t worrying about all that. She’s too busy feeling as if she is doing something that truly matters. This is why, at the end of the day, while I feel outraged at the effects of her actions on others, I primarily feel terrible for her. Her activism should anger me, as a Swedish Jew, and it does. But more than anything, it breaks my heart. Thunberg isn’t the disease; she is an aggressive symptom of it—a symptom of the radical emptiness we now see in our streets, in our social media feeds, and in our children. It is an unraveling much like a stray rubber ball in an empty room, bouncing from side to side without aim or end.

I know this because I, too, was once a lost Swedish girl, desperate to belong to something bigger than myself, wanting meaning and community and purpose. As humans, we yearn for those things. When we are raised in a place that tells us that values are the enemy, we make friends in all the wrong places. Until my 20s, all of my friends were part of a radical movement, whether militant feminist, environmental, or pro-Palestine. This was reflective of Europe’s political atmosphere at the time. And I would have continued in this way, had the 9/11 terror attack not woken me up from the comfort of European ennui and led me to return to faith and family.

The thing about rebellion is that it needs something to push against. When there’s nothing to rebel against, no norm to counter, no idea to question and debate, the energy of rebellion continues without meaning in perpetuity. Instead of debate, there is endless anger—instead of ideology, interchangeable, temporary causes.

Once the war is over, Thunberg will move on to another issue—most likely the loudest, most divisive one, whatever that might be at the time. It is, after all, just a placeholder for meaning, ideological busywork in a seemingly meaningless world, a substitute God for the faithless.